You give your AI coding agent a task. It gets to work. Thirty tool calls later you have code — and it’s not what you needed. The agent understood the words but missed the intent. It made a dozen small decisions that individually seemed reasonable, and collectively built the wrong thing. This isn’t a capability […]
Read More →A practical guide for developers navigating Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Codex, and beyond. You switch from Cursor to Claude Code. Or from Copilot to Windsurf. The interface is different. The shortcuts are different. The config file has a new name. And for a moment, it feels like you’re starting from scratch. You’re not. Under […]
Read More →Spec-driven development treats a structured specification—not the codebase—as the system of record. This post maps who does what when you work that way: from turning product intent into an agent-readable spec, through API contracts and UI rules, to validation that implementation still matches what you wrote down. Table of contents Overview Spec-driven development (SDD) is […]
Read More →AI coding agents are fast, but they cut corners. Agent Skills is an open-source project by Addy Osmani that gives agents the same structured workflows senior engineers follow, from spec to ship. This post breaks down how it works, explains the Google engineering principles it builds on (Hyrum’s Law, Chesterton’s Fence, the Beyonce Rule, Shift […]
Read More →A practitioner’s guide to knowing which one you actually need. “Spec-driven” is not one practice. It is a ladder—spec-first (write then ship, spec often rots), spec-anchored (spec and code stay checked in CI), and spec-as-truth / spec-as-source (humans edit only the spec; code is generated). This piece maps the three levels (after Birgitta Böckeler on martinfowler.com), their tradeoffs, a cheat sheet, and […]
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